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Village Wheats May Fend Off Stem Rust / November 27, 2007 / News from
the USDA Agricultural Research Service

Plant pathologist Blair Goates (left) and
agronomist Harold Bockelman prepare seed samples from the National Small Grains
Collection to be sent to east Africa for testing against new races of stem
rust. Click the image for more information about it.

Village Wheats May Fend Off Stem Rust

Traditional wheats, grown by
village farmers on the other side of the world, could hold genes that resist
attack by stem rust. Killer races of that formidable fungal disease pose a
threat to America's wheat, according to Agricultural Research Service (ARS) plant pathologist
J.
Michael Bonman.

As leader of the
ARS
Small Grains and Potato Germplasm Research Unit, Aberdeen, Idaho, Bonman
directs a fast-paced, high-intensity search for wheats that could fend off
rusts now emerging in east Africa. The team's focus is on the world's locally
grown wheats, known to scientists as "landraces." These wheats
typically are not as well-studied as those grown commercially on thousands of
acres in the United States, for instance.

However, thanks to years of work by generations of plant explorers, breeders
and others, seeds of 25,000 different kinds of local wheats are already at hand
in a special collection at the Aberdeen research center. The collection,
curated by ARS agronomist
Harold
E. Bockelman, serves as Americas official genebank of wheats gathered
from around the planet.

To learn more about the rust resistance of the genebanks landrace
wheats, Bonman and colleagues combed decades-old records of the
disease-fighting prowess of nearly 8,500 specimens. Plant pathologist Don V.
McVey, now retired from the
ARS
Cereal Disease Laboratory, St. Paul, Minn., created those records when he
tested the plants, beginning in 1988.

Though McVey couldnt have exposed the plants to the new wheat stem
rusts now damaging wheatfields of east Africa, his test results are nonetheless
still relevant today, according to Bonman.

The new analyses of McVeys findings revealed notable resistance in
wheats from, among other places, Chile, Ethiopia, Turkey, and Bosnia and
Herzegovina. The scientists are now intensifying their analyses of other
genebank landraces from these areasnot just those that McVey studied.
And, they're using the findings to choose specimens to send to Kenya and
Ethiopia, for testing in the heart of the rust epidemic.

Read
more about the research in the November/December 2007 issue of
Agricultural Research magazine.